Have you ever made yourself cry (over what you did to a character) while writing a book?

Welcome back to another edition of the Open Book Blog Hop! If you’re new to the series, the authors included are grateful for your reads and appreciate, even more so, when you share our writings with your friends. If you’re new to the series, welcome aboard. The authors engage and impress weekly. Be prepared to become a regular reader.

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Let me answer this question first by saying a few things that will help you to see me in a bigger, clearer picture…I am someone with great empathy and I am someone who is intuitive. I am also someone who has and uses discernment. The latter two have a great deal to do with the first. Some like to call people like me empaths, inferring we feel the emotions of others. Considering I come from a scientific background, I don’t necessarily lean on alternative ideas. I do believe, however, that the brain puts together a picture of the environment in which it exists, those it interacts with, and situations that arise from both. In other words, what some regard as psychic phenomena, is more likely the brain having put together clues it observed without the ego getting in the way—which is how some get it confused. It might feel like the information is coming from nowhere, but it has roots, it just bypassed the usual channels. That’s why, too, the assessments are often right. But, it’s not mind reading. It’s just an example of how powerful our minds are as processing computers. If you follow me.

The brain absorbs everything in a particular situation. It catalogs it. It assesses it. It remembers it. The thing is, we don’t remember seeing all the details. And, assessment can take days or weeks—sometimes years.

So what does this have to do with the question?

As you know, being empathic or empathetic, has a lot to do with emotions, and being able to comprehend of them in others. For example, when you see someone cry, you cry. That’s not sympathy. Empathy is understanding the suffering that another human being is experiencing in that moment–recognizing, acknowledging it.

Empathetic people are able to do this conceptually as well. This is why, for a lot of authors, characters are real. If you imagine the process we authors go through to create characters (characterization), then you should be able to infer (intuit) that those characters become virtually real.

Empathetic people are tortured by the idea of suffering in others, causing it or experiencing it with them. They’re in touch with their emotions, and feel them deeply. When characters in a book follow a trajectory that ends terribly for them, that investment creates emotion. The empathy we function with in real life situations is as much present. Thus, we feel the pain, the joy, the pleasure, the discomfort…all of it. Perhaps, that is why we write?

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In each of my works, when something has happened to one of my characters, I have felt for them, and, yes, I have cried. Do you ever watch the news and they tell the viewers of someone who had their whole life ahead of them, but died tragically instead? It’s like that. If you have empathy, you’ll register the tragedy of it. You’ll feel the terror.

The interesting thing is that writing comes from what we know or interpolate from our knowledge. In a way we’re empathizing with ourselves, because characters written by a person are, if not based on other real life people, based on the author themselves. When they die, that part of us dies. Thus, grief occurs.

Let’s hop on over and see what the other authors have to say about this topic…

Welcome back to another edition of the Open Book Blog Hop! If you’re new to the series, the authors included are grateful for your reads and appreciate, even more so, when you share our writings with your friends. If you’re new to the series, welcome aboard. The authors engage and impress weekly. Be prepared to become a regular reader.

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Some of you, who have followed my blog, or been in my life by some means, have followed my journey in parenting. This week’s question had me puzzled for a bit (as how to answer) until I remembered a certain aspect of my life and all the weirdness involved. Most parents will definitely relate, because there are a whole bunch of oddities you need to grab to care for an infant. Yes, they’re usually convenience items, but they’re great items to have around. However, my purchase was prior to any of that.

Many of you know that my daughter was conceived from IVF, and that I am a single mother. Some of you might have put together that this delicately infers an absence of a husband/boyfriend. Still fewer realize, even though it’s a given, that I had to purchase certain things in order to conceive. Yup, the weirdest thing I’ve ever purchased is semen.

Before you freak out, because I did enough for the lot of us between the ages of 30 and 40 building up to the moment, please remember that this is one of the most natural aspects of life—reproduction. Back in my early 30s, I was dead against this inevitability, but I knew that in order to make my family I had to find a man or get a donor. I just had hoped fate would have seen me to a decent fella before the later became the means. But, you know fate and all. So, there I found myself contacting a sperm bank on the other side of my country to figure out the next leg of my life journey.

I went through a handful of IUIs and had a miscarriage that resulted in me moving onto IVF. Three egg retrievals granted me one viable embryo. That embryo became my daughter. But what about the donors? The thing a lot of women don’t realize is that, unless they’re very lucky, they will not likely get pregnant with the first, so they will choose a few profiles before the work is done. Think of Build-A-Baby. You go into the site, you review candidates, setting criteria if you have any (and you might as well because that helps to lower the number). I went by looking for someone who looked like me. I couldn’t think of any other criteria to narrow the search, and I wanted to pass down the blue eyes I inherited from my grandfather, if at all possible.

You don’t get to make these decisions when you find a husband/boyfriend with which to start a family. Whoever the lucky chap is, that’s the genetic make up your children will share. And, it’s really tough trying to decide, basically, what your child will look like. But, it doesn’t get easier at all during any of this. Between cultural norms, personal beliefs, and the public it can get pretty rocky emotionally. It’s not that easy to choose this.

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Frankly, if you haven’t been through the process, then you have no idea what it is like to accept this material into your body (IUI). With brevity, I can explain a bit. Donor material is washed and frozen (meaning it’s cleaned up and preserved). The donors are tested and all that so there should be no issue with passing disease. Good lord! It’s bad enough. In order to inseminate you, they pass a filament past your cervix and insert the sample, hoping the little buggers do their job, and the egg released is a good one. It’s uncomfortable, like really bad cramps. All sorts of medication is taken prior to the event, which mess with your body and make you super uncomfortable too. It often works, but more often does not.

IVF is far more invasive, but the sample is added to eggs after a retrieval in a lab. It’s all very sciencey.

Imagine having charges to a sperm bank on your credit card, though. I figured the other copays made it obvious what was going on. Clearly people aren’t out there buying it for party favors, but who knows what someone who is not on the inside of my life would think! So between personal hang ups and the strangeness of this science, and the details of what is done, this has got to be, hands down, the most unusual thing I’ve had as an expense.

Let’s hop on over and see what unusual expenses our other authors have…

Many of us wax poetic at the end of winter and the return of spring. Let’s swap that around. What’s the one thing about spring that you can’t stand?

Welcome back to another edition of the Open Book Blog Hop! If you’re new to the series, the authors included are grateful for your reads and appreciate, even more so, when you share our writings with your friends. If you’re new to the series, welcome aboard. The authors engage and impress weekly. Be prepared to become a regular reader.

This is an older photo but it checks out. My patchy grass, before the fence replacement that turned it all to mud.

Spring, when it’s finally sprung, does make me very happy. But—there are a few things that make me less enthused. With the prospect of winter at last behind me, there’s not a lot I will be caught complaining about. The winter just makes me so miserable. The cold has gotten worse for my body to deal with, and my allergies do not let up no matter what time of year it is (mold).

So what about Spring disappoints me? The mud. As you know, I am a dog person. I’ve always had a dog in my life, and I always will. It seems, with that, I will have mud in my life! Where I have lived, currently and in the past, has had a grass problem—meaning not enough. I long for my parent’s, where this didn’t seem to be an issue at all.

At the current apartment, the backyard has been trampled by Fionn into a veritable mud pit. And, of course, he tracks it right across my tan carpets. There’s so much cleaning through the parts of winter and spring, and sometimes fall, where the ground is wet not frozen. Spring is the worst. This year, I have begun combatting this with laying down grass seed. So far, it’s working, as it’s sprouting and the lawn is filling in. But, this is going to be a long fight, that won’t clear up the problem this spring. I’ll be planting grass through spring and summer, to make that patch of grass I have nice and full. Anyone who has fought the lawn battle will fully understand what I’m facing. Thankfully, the area is small, and I can get away with less investment. So there’s that.

Mr. Fionn enjoying the sun as a puppy (2017).

As I mentioned above, there is no season that goes by without my allergies bugging me. They’re at their worst in late fall, winter, and spring. This is when the moisture gets into things, and mold blooms. I laugh when the apps to track allergens says there is no mold, but my allergies are banging. They need to get clear on where it is (not in the open air), and measure it better.

My allergies give me dizziness, headaches, sinus issues, red itchy eyes (with soreness on the lids), and fatigue. It’s been a struggle, because I find no rest from them, and they flair randomly. Thus, I’d have to take allergy medicine every single day, and I am not going to do that. Taking it as needed means that I am affected by drowsiness until the stuff builds up in my system. Since having Katie, I haven’t taken any, because I can’t be that level of tired with her. Driving and working, and caring for her needs otherwise are all too important. So, I push through. Once it gets drier, hopefully, the allergy subsides.

Regardless of these two things, I am mostly happy to see Spring again. The flowers and warmth improve my mood, and the better weather make it easier to be out and about.

Let’s hop on over and see what about spring bothers the other authors…

Welcome back to another edition of the Open Book Blog Hop! If you’re new to the series, the authors included are grateful for your reads and appreciate, even more so, when you share our writings with your friends. If you’re new to the series, welcome aboard. The authors engage and impress weekly. Be prepared to become a regular reader.

When I was a kid, I thought becoming a lawyer would be the greatest thing. As I paid more attention to the profession and what goes on, the less likeable the field became. Certainly there are good people fighting the good fight out there, but they face so many who stand in direct opposition to real fairness and equity. Unfortunately, there are regular people who back it, saying we can’t legislate this or that because that’s a slippery slope or it removes freedom. I’ve also grown to recognize this enabling as part of a warped co-dependency to personality disorders.

I do not understand wanting to enforce religious belief into law or other unethical ideas. One has to be mighty careful what they put into law and be able to discern outcomes well down the road before they go ahead. I do not envy lawmakers. Neither the fights they face helping constituents, nor the forces working to corrupt them are appealing job tasks. Few seem to evade the eventual corruption, and end up having done little good. And, the masses are ready to feed on you the moment you step the slightest out of line.

If I had to pick, one thing, it would be a toss up between a universal healthcare law or comprehensive changes to address climate change. These two issues are the biggest things facing my part of the world, climate being universal across the planet. Other than that, I’d be interested in legislating something that addresses income inequality, creating better wages for everyone, instead of subpar wages that have remained at a buying power on par with fifty years ago.

We have no second planet to run to, nor the technology if we did. People shouldn’t be denied care. And, everyone should have thriving wages, as that’s the gasoline of the economy. It’d be really hard to decide which of these I’d like to bring into being more. They’re even intertwined (ill health is caused by environmental factors and poverty/low wages). The truth is, we can’t just do one of them and then expect everything to be great. Likely, I’d choose climate, alleviating environmental issues that are causing health issues, including starvation/malnutrition. Hopefully, somehow, the others would follow, and bring prosperity and health to the world–not just my nation.

If you could trade lives with anyone for just one day, who would it be and why?

Welcome back to another edition of the Open Book Blog Hop! If you’re new to the series, the authors included are grateful for your reads and appreciate, even more so, when you share our writings with your friends. If you’re new to the series, welcome aboard. The authors engage and impress weekly. Be prepared to become a regular reader.

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This question has been asked of me before, in other places and other times. I always give it a good think before I answer, because I always marvel at my own certainty that I never want to change lives with anyone. Not since I was a child have I thought this might be amusing or cathartic in some manner. Certainly it would have the capacity to teach, but the likelihood of it being anything but another painful memory is very slim.

That is exactly why I like this question, though. It’s a check in for me. It let’s me know if my depression and anxiety are getting to be too much. It let’s me know that I am in a good place. Unequivocally. For a long time I was not attached to life, though I did not live dangerously in the face of that feeling. But, this certainty hung out with me through all the dark times I ever experienced, and that was how I knew I was okay.

Wanting to be someone else, at least in my assessment, has a lot to do with escaping the self. In some cases, people would like to influence something important (to themselves, others, or the world). When I think of this, I think of how you’d be taking someone’s body from them, in a bizarre form of possession. It would be like rape, or on that level, I assume. The mind of the person, once returned would be touched by the event, forever changing them. They would not trust themselves, their memory, or their form. They would feel like someone had lurked around their home, touching their most intimate things, and having done it for days—years. They would not be able to undo it, but, more importantly, they would not have been able to consent to the use of their body.

I could not do this to another person. And, I hope to God, that no one would do this to me. I’ve been violated verbally and physically, and it is not an injury that truly heals. One is scarred by it, and the permanent trauma manifests without warning. Inflicting that on another human being is an ultimate cruelty.

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I’d much rather do whatever it is I feel a need to do as myself. Sure, there is the issue of having on power to accomplish those goals. Thus, I’m facing a lot of wasted time to get into position and place, but that’s the price of not being a monster, and doing things the right way.

That said, there may be a very good reason to take over someone’s life for a day. What if you were placed to stop a murder, or many murders, or other serious crimes? Is the price worth it? What if the person you were putting on like a stocking was apprised and consented? That totally changes the situation, doesn’t it?

For me, though, I would not have an interest in being anyone else.

Let’s hop on over to see what the other authors think about this question…